We read the article by Kwon et al with great interest.
As the authors pointed out, effective remote teaching not only requires faculty access to appropriate software and hardware but also knowledge and experience to troubleshoot while working with both tools. Although there has been tremendous advancement in image acquisition and broadcast, it comes with a cost that might be difficult for many teaching centers to incorporate into their budget, especially with cost‐cutting measures occurring during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID‐19) pandemic. In our experience, teaching via video conferencing in surgical pathology was not that difficult. However, cytology was different, as was highlighted by Kwon et al.
We incorporated Canvas, which already was site‐licensed by Emory University for online instruction, as a teaching tool in cytopathology. We used Studio (an application within the Canvas interface) to make high‐quality videos (akin to scans of the slides), and important clusters were focused at ×10, ×20, and ×40 magnification (to overcome problems with the z‐axis). Videos can be made with virtually any microscope camera that currently is available. Interactive questions can be added to these videos for active learning (as opposed to passive learning in didactic recorded video lectures). Videos are stored on the Canvas server; they do not consume space on the “C” drive, the local hard drive of the personal computer of the course designer. There is no need for a whole‐slide imager with this application. No additional costs for licensing imaging software are incurred by the department because the program is site‐licensed to the university. An entire cytopathology course with separate chapters was created with videos for separate cases to simulate scanning at the microscope. The videos also were used to create assignments and questions were stored in item banks for future use. Resident physicians and fellows can access these at any time, even when they are not on a cytology rotation, which also is helpful for keeping them accustomed to reviewing cytopathology material.The authors of the original article were given the opportunity to respond but declined.